by Peter Annhernu, Digital Media Arts, January 2010

Digital media is changing the work and status of the curator. Is this new context a threat to the curator’s professional role or an opportunity to take a new position in cultural production?

Part 1: How did the role of curator come to be what it is today?

To understand where curatorship is going, we need to understand where it came from. The practice of curatorship is something that emerged from the world of the museum during the Age of Enlightenment (17^th & 18^th Centuries). Although contemporary art and museum curators seem to be quite different now, they share a common history and many of their core activities (research, selection, cataloguing, devising ontology and presentation) are carried out in the same way.

It’s possible to trace a history of ideas about the display of art from the Louvre, to the Berlin museums, to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and back from there to Europe’s contemporary art spaces.

Part 2: The curator’s role in cultural production

To investigate the work of the curator means we need to look at the “supply chain” of art and culture from originator to the “audience”. Essentially this is an investigation into “cultural production”. One of the best thinkers on this topic was the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930 – 2002). His work on why way art and culture is valued and how it is consumed is very helpful when trying to understand the roles that curators, artists and other cultural workers play.

Part 3: The practice of curatorship in the networked world

So what is the new world of the web doing for curatorship? Engagement of curators with the web, social media etc is still at a very immature stage. However there are some interesting examples out there – some that enhance traditional curatorship (eg eHive), some that look at digital art production and curation itself (eg Rhizome, CRUMB) and some that seek to “crowd source” curation (Saatchi Online). There are many examples of curators seeking to present work through the web, but the great majority of curatorial output in this medium feels like publishing rather than presentation.

Part 4: The future

The curator’s role has always shifted and expanded throughout its history, and will continue to do so. Advances in technology make it easier to undertake some of the core curatorial tasks, but bring new challenges, especially in the area of effective online presentation. Currently, the art world has a lot of interest in the curator and curatorship but there is also a lot of resistance to the expansion of the role into “authorship”. At the same time, funding is under threat and the concept of curatorship is being “borrowed” by other media forms, particularly journalism. It may be that the practice of curatorship ends up escaping the job of being a curator and instead becomes a set of skills applied by anyone involved in the field of cultural production.

I’ve added a phto from a client’s building just to test the feature.

I finally got around to updating my company’s site. To be found at www.surfaceimpression.com . My main aims were to:

• Make it simpler – reduce content so we can keep it up to date easier!
• Be visually quite quirky – just enough to be distinctive, not so much as to be annoying
• Focus on our projects
• Do something tricky with CSS (more for my own gratification). See how the pages scroll – certain areas are fixed on the screen, others scroll, but it’s easy to use

The ranking screen – shows submitted work and its ‘score’. Users can view rankings and scores by judge or by average and also order the work by other criteria.

The rating screen – shows how the panelists will rate each piece of work submitted.

So the decision was made to reduce reliance on Flash more and more, until it became something I might use a couple of times a month, rather than every day. But recently I’ve been wanting to develop some applications that require the kind of interaction best served by Flash. I instantly became frustrated in the Flash authoring environment so I thought I’d have another look at Flex.

For those that haven’t come across it, Flex is a system for generating Flash .swf files that Macromedia (then Adobe) created to be more RIA (rich internet application) focused. Audience-wise they’re looking at web developers and the corporate sector, but there’s no reason I can’t have a go!

Flex is now open source, and doesn’t even need an application interface at all. You can write code in a text editor and then compile the .swf using a command line in Terminal (the mac command line tool). So it’s entirely free. There are paid for interfaces using the Eclipse application development environment but I couldn’t be bothered with that.

What Flex gives you is a large set of Flash components and a really nice way to join them together in layout, style and most importantly, interaction. You write code that is XML in flavour largely, with style sheets and actionscript. For all the world it seems like hand-coding an HTML web page. Something I do every day.

So now I’ve created my first serious Flex application and I’m really pleased with it. It’s taken a lot less time than using the Flash authoring environment and I’ve run into a lot less bottlenecks. Still loads to do with it though!

Watch this space to see the thing itself!

The process that has emerged from this is that you need to have:

a) A web based application to compose your printed item that needs to be able to receive an image, scale and position it and add text to it. You might also need to be able to add supplementary info such as dates of a show, copyright info, blurb etc

b) A server-based application to take the information from the user’s composition and create a high resolution PDF from it and add things like crop marks etc.

c) A means to deliver this PDF to a print provider

Useful applications for this process might be:

• An automated mail out that sends a card to a gallery or museum’s mailing list
• A print on demand system that allows people to order prints of work that they like on a web site (and customise it)
• Lot of other things!

The next logical step would be to look at ways people capture images of work (if it has not been originated in a computer). Currently the whole process of taking a piece, scanning it, cleaning it up, creating a file, then uploading that file somewhere are fraught with difficulties for most users. Alternatives such as digital photography throw up other problems (with lighting, with ‘squareness’, with resolution). 

Something needs to be done!

Basically it will allow a curator or a ‘panel’ of curators to:

1. Issue a ‘call for submissions’ for an exhibition
2. Receive submissions of images, multimedia and descriptions of work through the web
3. Rate and rank the work submitted to aid their decision making process (this is the interesting bit!)
4. Present the work via the web (as a compliment to a show or event in a physical space) or as a stand alone item

That’s it! Easy to say, difficult to execute. So far I’ve got point 4 under control. Point 3 is where all my research is going right now.

Anyway, I discovered a quote from an American engineer called Vannevar Bush about the possibilities for computing. He was writing in 1947 and exploring ideas for connected computing which he called the ‘memex’.

“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ‘memex’ will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

He describes the mechanics of this thing, which in his mind were photographic – much like microfilm. But we could read as ‘personal computer’ or increasingly ‘smart phone’.

Anyway he then goes on to describe:

“… It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word.

…

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space.”

So, he’s saying – link two or more resources together (= a hyperlink), use a code to refer to each link (= a URL) and tap a button (= er, a button) to get from one to the other.

The thinking certainly impressed me. 

The original article that these quotes are source from is here: www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush.shtml

I wanted to find a biography for him too and discovered a site that profiles many of the names behind the development of the world wide web. Go to www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html to see for yourself.

I really wanted to show the Joshua Davis experimental Flash art site Praysation but unfortunately that has now been retired. This site is a good example of one of his products though – it’s art generated by algorithm according to a set of rules applied to some aesthetic assets. I like this as a concept because it uses the power of the medium and is presented through the web only. Funnily enough I’m not that keen on the products themselves aesthetically!

Duff: http://www.mappalujo.com

I still like this project, which I put together in 2002 with the writers Jeff Noon and Steve Beard. The (literary) work is good but I think I missed a trick in not managing to get across what the piece was all about and the set of rules and techniques that were used to create it. It would also have been nice to capture viewers’ versions of the texts and solicit other kinds of user input. However, my skills weren’t up to that at the time! It was, however, a piece created purely for display on the web – wether you consider it Net Art depends on whether your definition of Art includes literature!

The way this works is that I sample the brightness of a pixel at the center of the ball and compare that to the brightness it was one frame ago. If there is enough difference between the colours, the logic takes that pixel as having experienced motion and then inflates the diameter of the ball.

Here’s the code:


import processing.video.*;
Capture myCapture;
int lastRotate;
color trigger;
color lastTrigger;
boolean triggered;
int radius;

Once I’d got that working, I experimented with an app to move the ball around, rather than just inflate it. To start with I just wanted to make it go from right to left so I set up a couple of pixel points, which are always the same distance away from the ball. Then I measure change in the two pixels – if the rightmost one registers change and then the leftmost one does so a frame later then I can safely assume there is movement to the left.

So far I have got the ball moving, but the thresholds need playing with as it is rather insensitive. I found that angling my hand so that it is in as much shadow as possible helps. What would be really good is to figure out how to identify particular areas on the screen (for example the block of colour of a finger tip) so I can attach my ball to that and then move it around. Experiments will continue!

Anyway, here’s the result of an app that captures the video and then lets you scribble all over it:

And here’s the code:


import processing.video.*;
Capture myCapture;
boolean scribble;
boolean hasDrawn;

My experiments started off with the Turtle graphics as part of Ollie’s tutorial but I really started to enjoy it when getting into user input. Firstly here’s my ‘tapeworm’ drawing app! I had actually intended to do something that put a black stroke on a white line, but that was a but tricky with processing as layers are difficult to implement. Looks fun though!

Here’s the code:


float myStroke;

void setup(){
size(800,600);
background(255,0,0);
stroke(255,255,255);

smooth();
myStroke=0;
}

void draw(){
if(mousePressed){
myStroke+=0.2;
stroke(0,0,0);
strokeWeight(myStroke*1.2);

I also had a play with the 3D engine within Processing and came up with this shape which you can move around in space with your mouse. The mouse movement influences the camera position rather than moving the object – it’s actually quite hard to spot the logic of what your movements are doing but it’s interesting all the same!

[Click the image above to see the animation...]

From the Flash training day on 15th Oct.

I haven’t done any pure animation in Flash for some time so it was fun to play with this. Here’s my effort from the day. I used the vCam component that Sam showed me to try and fake that hand-held camera look that you see all over the telly and films etc.

The images were sourced from Visipix.com which is a free image library. They have some digitized archive material including lots of Japanese Wood Blocks.

Things that sprung to mind are mostly about where Second Life would need to go to really catch my interest, the thoughts I can remember are:

• The over-arching computer game (Doom 3D engine-esque) aesthetic does put me off a bit, I think I’d like to see the potential to be more ‘modernist’ – less decoration with dull bitmaps etc. 
• On the same theme I’d like to be able to affect the rendering style of the environment – how about a rotoscoped look, or film noir, or a pastiche of an arts style and so on – some the things you can do with 3D software.
• I’d want to know more about the audiences that would be there for the work
• I was impressed by the ‘installation’ we saw, much more than the rendition of 2D artwork within the environment – the installation seemed to be more ‘true’ to the medium. Having said that, I did like the room with the photo exhibition where the creator had taken a lot of effort to create a lit ambience. Although that was faked up, it does indicate where it all could go.
• Discussion afterwards (over lunch) brought up the idea of what boundaries of political freedom there would be within the system – is there a Second Earth First monkeywrenching the virtual system to reduce the power consumption of the servers!